GOODIER, Mark

THE MAN, or so the jingles had it, Who’s Got The Best Music, inevitably rechristened Mark Goodybags for assorted stints in various timeslots – including Saturday night’s Club 2200 – which led to early-evening Teatime Show, with features such as the Music Jam (teatime = jam, see?), before unexpected relocation to The Evening Session, where he was heard to vociferously champion the likes of Carter USM, Gary Clail, Nirvana, Teenage Fanclub, Primal Scream and those ones that did that Pattern 26 thing, along with introduction of the Collins & Maconie double-act with their Back To The Planet-mocking ‘Eyewitness Reports’. Also helmed the inexcusable six o’clock chartfest Megahits, of Alan McGee Ride-hyping phone-rigging scandal infamy, and the full-blown Top Forty show.

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He was the best user of talk-up jingles I’ve ever heard, and had to be, as they were used in both the Top 40 and the Megahits countdown and it’s unrelentlessly shit if you mistime them. He got so good he used to use them into the news jingle too during normal shows. Slick as they come.

I once got selected as a winner on Megahits after spending God knows how much on entering. These were of course the days of the 0898, 36 pence a minute off peak, 48 pence a minute at all other time numbers. I think I was supposed to be the reserve but they transposed my name and number with someone else and as they’d called me first they let me win. As a naive radio obsessed youth I was confused as to why they phoned me at about 4pm rather than 7pm but then realised it was pre-recorded. I was also puzzled as to why I couldn’t hear the mega hits bed in the background when it was being recorded and it was only when I heard it played out that I realised they’d spliced it together to make it sound tight and slick before playing it out. Oh, and I won £100 of record vouchers and a nice Sony walkman.

My abiding memory of him is when he was on the weekend breakfast show with Liz Kershaw (pre-Bruno?) and Liz had snagged an interview with Bros. Mark was pretending the Goss brothers were live in the studio even though it was only Liz we heard asking questions, until he got clever and tried to make it sound as if he had asked them something. Unfortunately the tape wasn’t quite cued properly and Bros started off slow then sped up to normal speed, revealing his ruse as the sham it was. A sham, I tell you!